busy at work on a few projects

[alyaza]

yesterday was quite busy in no small part because i am currently involved in the machinations of the Website League; this post-Cohost will hopefully get up and running at the end of the month, but it means a lot of my time is spent acting as a de facto secretary keeping minutes and refining ideas into a useful state for everyone.

unrefined thoughts on religion and society

adapted from a Discord chat earlier this week—

i think i would consider religion an influence we need to overcome in society, and probably transcend eventually. but one of the reasons i'm unsure of this position (and why i've spent a lot of time thinking about it in the first place) is the practical logistics of that eventually taking place.

in practice the only way people seem to actually "deconvert from religion" en masse is through authoritarianism. you can make people de facto irreligious (see East Germany for example), but at scale this seems to almost exclusively be accomplished best by forcibly making people give up their faith and totally impeding its practice, which i think is probably not the way to go. for the most part i think you have the right to practice whatever religious or spiritual system you want.

absent authoritarian measures, however, when most people "deconvert" they seem to just go from being religious to being spiritual—and they don't really give up the corrosive underlying thought-processes many religions impress on their followers. there are tons of American cultural Christians, agnostics, or atheists who still replicate and live by the exact structures of discrimination, authoritarianism, and inequality religions create and encourage. and even if you are an american agnostic or atheist, you probably still had a pretty religious upbringing of some kind statistically and that influences how you live your life (and why)

i guess the place of transmission i'd identify here is how people get raised specifically. it seems like if you want to reduce the influence or religion you would have to fight the norms people raise their children with (which even if they're not christian in America for example are probably strongly informed by what christianity thinks is right).

what i'm reading

Meet the Neighbors (ch 1) provides useful detail for backing up Bookchin's assertion that "the idea of dominating nature has its primary source in the domination of human by human and in the structuring of the natural world into a hierarchical chain of being." Keim notes that:

For more than two thousand years, belief in animal unintelligence had spread through Western civilization. Aristotle, zoologist as well as philosopher, thought animals capable of feeling only pain or hunger; his hierarchical taxonomy of life, with humans perched on top, was adapted by Christian theologians bent on replacing pagan beliefs in human–animal kinship. They emphasized rationality as a supposedly defining human trait and laid the foundations for Enlightenment thinkers such as Nicholas Malebranche, a seventeenth-century philosopher who neatly distilled the attitude of his peers when he said animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

Comments

[pnictogen_wing]

hrm. I mean, I'm religious =D and it makes sense to me. what's the thing about religious beliefs that's socially disruptive? not all religions feel compelled to proselytize, for example ~Chara

[alyaza]

i think almost unavoidably religion--especially structured, but even unstructured--leads toward magical thinking (because necessarily it is a unfalsifiable leap of faith) and/or authoritarian and theologically infallible though processes that just aren't super reconcilable with an equal and fair world in the long term

[pnictogen_wing]

ah! that's very sensible. I've persuaded myself, however, that these things can be corralled within reason in fact—I suggest that there is a *sensible* way to incorporate the (very low) probability that magic might have something to it into a rational framework, by accepting mystery as a fundamental concept, the idea of something permanently unknowable. ~Chara

[malusdraco]

huh- i don't know i agree but it's an interesting point and is making me think. christianity is really the biggest problem imo. in the hypothetical situation where one could just poof it away i think a lot of the baggage around religion would dissipate (but would all of it? that i don't know).

i'd also say that there's kinda two aspects of religion that influence its perception and its impact on the world at large- there's the personal aspect (i.e. a christian not believing in evolution) but there's also the community aspect (recruiting, missions, etc).

there are tons of American cultural Christians, agnostics, or atheists who still replicate and live by the exact structures of discrimination, authoritarianism, and inequality religions create and encourage

this is mostly referring to in-group/out-group tensions, right? (with a side order of religious leaders having too much power) because i THINK it's possible to practice religion/spirituality on a larger scale without considering anyone outside of your community lower than you. to me at least, it doesn't seem antithetical (virtually NO experience with religion, and no sociological research to back this up).

i guess my question is, how much of the general shit going on perpetrated by religious groups do you think is attributed to religion/spirituality as a concept, and how much to christianity specifically, or even christian influence via colonization

(now i'm thinking about the concepts of punishment, and rule following/law, how much that's been influenced by specifically christianity, and how much that in turn has influenced general western culture... yeah we'd probably be better trying to pull out at least those roots)